Con Dolore's name is the clue to the kind of music you'll find here: with grief, with sadness, with melancholy, with muted concern. This Sad Movie produces a soundscape, sere and bittersweet, creating a story with its pictures.
The band's thesis concept is to make a movie using these songs, with each tune representing a single still frame. The album art cleverly echoes the idea with its "movie" of stills; a series of photos of a well-dressed, pretty woman, who leaves a hapless and clueless male to stand openmouthed on the pavement as she speeds away in a cab, relate the standard tale of love and loss. It has to be the smartest cover art I've seen in a while, and hints encouragingly at the disc's contents. Sampled drums, layered synth and muted guitars swirl with the modulated and harmonized voices of band members Kristy Moss and Ed Ballinger; shoegazer pop meets ambient and a vocoder, and steals some of the best tricks that genre and tool have to offer. "Why Are You Hiding" sounds like the voices in the cemetery in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; oozing layers of soft soprano drip eerily through the track like Spanish moss, and some of the samples have been distorted to sound inhuman. Guitars strum a very gentle melody, over which Kristy Moss' voice rises, like a younger version of the Sundays' Harriet Wheeler. Toward the end of the song, a xylophone adds a delicately childish and southern accompaniment to the speeding -- but still soft -- guitars. "She's Withering" launches with sliding guitar chords; the drum machines sound like tapping blocks, and Moss and Ballinger's voices create a subtle harmony with the sounds' hushed interplay. Lyrics aren't too important here; I can barely hear what they're saying most of the time. Occasional audible lines reinforce the mood created by the instrumentals: "Push the love from out of your body", "She flies away, she's withering, withering", and so on.
The group claims to love Mazzy Star. While their sound is lusher, and not as stripped to the chassis as Mazzy Star's seminal So Tonight That I Might See, Con Dolore's heroes are definitely echoed in their songs. To tell the truth, I own So That Tonight I Might See -- but as much as I like it, I'd trade two So That Tonight I Might Sees for one This Sad Movie any day.
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